Jane Conger Belson Shimane

b. 1927
d. 2002

LOGOS (1957)
16mm, color, sound, 2m
Soundtrack by Henry Jacobs.
According to Robert Pike’s A Critical Study of the West Coast Experimental Film Movement (1960): “The film was premiered at the 1957 Art in Cinema Festival sponsored by the San Francisco Museum of Art; it was selected for presentation at the 1958 Brussels Experimental Film Competition and then the Ninth International Design Conference in Aspen.”

ODDS & ENDS (1959)
16mm, color, sound, 3.5m
Soundtrack by Henry Jacobs.
According to Robert Pike’s A Critical Study of the West Coast Experimental Film Movement (1960): “As is the case with most of the really serious filmartists, Jane Belson produced many batches of experimental footage in her exploration in the medium. Many of these experiments, highly interesting in themselves, have not yet been carried into a finished production. But in 1959, she produced a cinematic collage entitled Odds & Ends, which graphically relates much of her experimental footage along with live action ‘trims’ and ‘out-takes’ borrowed from Denver Sutton’s and Ralph Luce’s Studio 16 company, into a total dadaistic-abstract structure.”

UNFINISHED (?) WORKS

In his 1960 UCLA Master’s Thesis, A Critical Study of the West Coast Experimental Film Movement, Robert Pike writes about three other films the artist was apparently working on, but which have never materialized. I’ll just quote Pike’s thesis here for further information and context:

“To date, Odds & Ends is Jane Belson’s last completed film, and if Logos and Odds & Ends were the only two examples of her work, it would be somewhat premature to laud her as the most promising of the new group of San Francisco filmartists. But two other films are also near completion: Seven Points, a non-objective color film, and Red Dot, a surrealistic animation color film. The creative artistry displayed in these works, plus the many batches of experimental footage, give a clear indication of an extremely gifted talent. Jane Belson has the one quality that so many of the other new West Coast filmartists lack: a formal background in art plus the graphic sensitivity of an artist. The newest project on her agenda is to be The Vipers, a film using live action and animation. It will be interesting to see if she is able to work as well with actors as she has with paintings and cut-outs.”

Curiously, in his thesis Pike also refers to Lynn Fayman having made a film called Red Dot in 1951, and this unusual coincidence of titles leads me to wonder if Pike has possibly confused the title of Fayman’s film when writing about Conger Belson Shimane’s film.